{"id":133592,"date":"2025-11-11T07:30:10","date_gmt":"2025-11-11T07:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/133592\/"},"modified":"2025-11-11T07:30:10","modified_gmt":"2025-11-11T07:30:10","slug":"thomas-s-kaplan-is-selling-a-20-million-rembrandt-drawing-of-lion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/133592\/","title":{"rendered":"Thomas S. Kaplan is Selling a $20 Million Rembrandt Drawing of Lion"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tSotheby\u2019s hosted a lunch for American-Franco precious metals mogul, philanthropist, and conservationist Thomas S. Kaplan<\/a> at its Paris HQ last week. The house is selling a coveted drawing of a lion by Rembrandt<\/a> from the trove of 17th-century Dutch Golden Age art that the billionaire and his wife, Daphne, have collected over the last 20 years. Dubbed the Leiden Collection, it\u2019s 220-work-strong and includes the world\u2019s largest private cache of Rembrandt paintings (17), not to mention the only Vermeer in private hands.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe couple only needs to acquire five more Rembrandts before they\u2019d own as many as the Rijksmuseum does. Forbes estimated Kaplan\u2019s fortune to be $1 billion in 2017, so they have the financial willpower. <\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\n\tTitled Young Lion Resting (ca. 1638\u201342), the drawing has a high estimate of $20 million and will hit the auction block in New York in February. Kaplan will donate all proceeds to Panthera, the wild cat conservation charity he founded in 2006. While the price far exceeds the auction record for a Rembrandt drawing ($3.7 million for his Windmill de Smeerpot, Amsterdam, ca. 1649\u201352), it is dwarfed by the current auction record for a work on paper\u2014$48 million, for Raphael\u2019s Head of Apostle (ca. 1519).<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd if you\u2019re wondering about the highest price paid for any Rembrandt work, that\u2019s $33.2 million, when Sotheby\u2019s sold his Portrait of a Man with Arms Akimbo (1658) in 2009.<\/p>\n

\n\tKaplan told ARTnews he hopes his philanthropic wildcat mission will drive bidding for the drawing, which his wife encouraged him to buy in 2005. He told the 20 or so journalists and art experts during the lunch that she said: \u201cTom, it\u2019s a Rembrandt. It\u2019s a lion, and it\u2019s beautiful. If it\u2019s not for you, then who is it for?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBefore we were seated, Young Lion Resting was unveiled on an easel. Beautifully rendered in black and white chalk on brown paper, it is thought to be the last of six lion drawings Rembrandt made. Dressed in a blue three-piece suit, Kaplan politely batted away my question about his recently revealed plans to fractionalize his Rembrandt paintings<\/a>. \u201cToday I\u2019d like to focus on the lion and wild cat conservation,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m more than happy to talk about fractionalization at a later date.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tI pulled up my chair next to Sotheby\u2019s managing director, Marie-Anne Ginoux, and opposite the house\u2019s head of Old Master drawings, Gregory Rubinstein. Before the first course of foie gras was served, he stood up and said Rembrandt\u2019s lion drawing \u201cbrings together two very different strands of his genius: his extraordinary gift for the observation of nature, and his unrivaled ability to see to the very heart and the soul of his subjects, in his portraits and his history paintings alike.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cDrawn from life with extraordinary energy and movement, the drawing is a work of breathtaking skill,\u201d he added. \u201cOnly in the greatest drawings does every stroke, every minute modulation of tone, feel so perfectly judged, and convey so much. Young Lion Resting is one of the most significant Old Master drawings to appear at auction in decades.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe floor was then given to Kaplan, who delivered an apparently off-the-cuff speech about how he acquired Young Lion Resting from John and Paul Herring\u2019s New York gallery. He said his family don\u2019t \u201clive with any of our Rembrandts\u201d because \u201cwe\u2019re not interested in material things, nor the social side of collecting.\u201d This is why the Kaplans remained anonymous when \u201caggressively\u201d lending works (80 of them and counting) from the Leiden Collection to institutions including St. Petersburg\u2019s Hermitage Museum, the National Museum of China, and the Louvre. However, the couple stepped out of the shadows to further the cause of Panthera, and to help the Rembrandt collection enter the public domain, \u201cbecause our mission was for them to be seen.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe turning point came when Arthur Wheelock, the National Gallery of Art\u2019s curator of Northern Baroque painting, urged him to take the collection public. \u201cI was crossing the Rubicon, because every time I put myself out there in the public, I know that the Kaplans become the story very quicky,\u201d Kaplan said. \u201cI had to come to terms with that. It doesn\u2019t take a genius to buy Rembrandt. It takes a genius to be Rembrandt\u2026 It\u2019s not about the collector, it\u2019s about the artist. Going public wasn\u2019t an act of self-promotion, but an effort to highlight Rembrandt\u2019s enduring human and artistic values.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAfter a main course of tuna, I had a chance to sit down with Kaplan one-on-one, when I tested his resolve about discussing his plans to sell shares in his Rembrandt collection, coined Project Minerva. He told me that he was only interested in doing it in a way that truly democratized the collection and gave it the most exposure, because he said there are easier ways to make money from the works. \u201cIf I can\u2019t do it right, I won\u2019t do it,\u201d he said, adding that there was an 18-month time frame on a possible launch. Watch this space.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sotheby\u2019s hosted a lunch for American-Franco precious metals mogul, philanthropist, and conservationist Thomas S. Kaplan at its Paris…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":37753,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[307,304,305,306,308,93,61,60,28206,4455,28990],"class_list":{"0":"post-133592","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-artsdesign","12":"tag-design","13":"tag-entertainment","14":"tag-ie","15":"tag-ireland","16":"tag-rembrandt","17":"tag-sothebys","18":"tag-thomas-s-kaplan"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133592","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=133592"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133592\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/37753"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=133592"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=133592"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=133592"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}